From chaos to calm: A wild year in the Big 12

Thursday

Aug 30, 2012 at 10:08 PM

Nick Kosmider

What a difference a year makes.

Just last September, football coaches, athletic directors and university presidents in the Big 12 Conference were tossing and turning at night, unsure of where they would be laying their heads when the swirling storm of conference realignment talks finally subsided.

"The unknown is the worst thing in our business," Tuberville said, "and we had to make sure we landed on our feet because we were between a rock and a hard place. We're farther west than anybody after Colorado left, so we wanted to make sure that we were going to be in one of the big leagues.

"I didn't think there was much of a doubt that we wouldn't, but there's still that small doubt of, 'Hey, what's going to happen?'"

To the relief of Tuberville, and others around the Big 12, stability happened.

The conference lost Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC, but it gained a pair of league champions in TCU (Mountain West) and West Virginia (Big East). A lucrative television contract is on the way, and the newly created Champions Bowl - a matchup of top Big 12 and SEC teams - promises even greater national exposure for the conference.

"It's amazing," Tuberville said. "The last six months have been a breath of fresh air."

Last September, Tuberville and many of the league's other coaches spent portions of their weekly press conferences addressing growing rumors about the potential of conference realignment.

How will your team's style of play fit in this league? Would it be difficult for fans to travel to games in that league? How would it affect recruiting in this state if you joined that conference?

The questions wouldn't stop, so to find answers, the Big 12 went to the bullpen.

'Hand on the tiller'

Chuck Neinas was far removed from his successful 1970s-era reign over the Big Eight Conference when he was approached last September with the idea of taking over a league in dire straits on a temporary basis after commissioner Dan Beebe was ousted.

This wasn't asking a captain to jump aboard the sinking Titanic, but it wasn't too far off.

"During a time when there was great instability, we were fortunate enough to entice Chuck Neinas to come and put his hand on the tiller and try and bring a period of calm to the league," said Bob Bowlsby, who was selected to replace Neinas as the league's full-time commissioner in May. "Under his guidance, we brought TCU and West Virginia into the league. He had a tremendous calming force. And through his sage advice and insights and experience, we were able to get through a really tough time."

Though A&M and Missouri were on their way out the door, Neinas talked the remaining members away from the ledge while pursuing new ones. By October, TCU was preparing to leave the Big East - a conference it never played a game in - for the Big 12, and by February, after settling a lawsuit that allowed it to depart from the Big East, West Virginia was also heading west.

Soon work began on putting together a television deal with Fox and ESPN, one Bowlsby expects to be finalized soon, he said during Big 12 media days. The deal, Bowlsby said, is expected to include a 13-year grant of rights, which would force a member school that wanted to leave the conference before 2026 to give up its media rights to the conference.

Such a deal - similar to ones struck by the SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 in recent years - should mean stability in the conference for the foreseeable future, which was far from the case the previous two seasons.

"Our league is every bit as strong as it's ever been, if not stronger," said Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops, a refrain that was repeated by just about every one of the league's coaches during media days.

Standing pat?

So with all this momentum - with the television contracts, the strong, new teams and a marquee bowl game - it seems like the perfect time for the Big 12 to add more programs, right? To take advantage of the opportunity to turn the Big 12 into a super conference, or, at the very least, return to the 12-team lineup the league's name suggests?

Not so fast, Bowlsby says.

"This is the group of 10 institutions," the commissioner said, "that if we were to press for raised hands in a meeting room around the issue of expansion, I don't know that we'd get two votes for moving to a larger number."

For now, the comfort of stability seems to have trumped the dreams of more teams and more money. Bowlsby said the round-robin scheduling in football and men's and women's basketball that allows everyone to play everyone else and determine the so-called "true champion" is a point of pride for the conference.

"It is the best of all circumstances," Bowlsby said. "I think it is also a situation where at the end of the season not only do we identify a true champion, but our true champion is going to have a great chance to get to that four-team playoff." (The four-team football playoff, approved by a presidential oversight committee in June, begins during the 2014 season.)

Coaches will still have plenty of sleepless nights when the season kicks off this weekend. That's the nature of the job. But at least for now, they only have worry about how they'll play the games, not where they'll play them.

Neinas, who was honored for his contributions to the conference by having the league's coach of the year award named after him, summed up his impression of the league's future simply at media days.

"If the Big 12 is a stock," he said, "you would get a buy order from me."

To comment on this story:

nick.kosmider@lubbockonline.com • 766-8735

george.watson@lubbockonline.com • 766-2166

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